Historically, recruiting and hiring an individual for a particular position in a company was time consuming and did not necessarily result in the hiring of an appropriate individual for a particular position. If an employer, which is referred to as a client for the purposes of explaining the present invention, wishes to hire an individual for a particular position, such a position would generally be listed, for example, in a number of trade publications or an employment counselor would be hired to provide the client with a list of potential candidates for the position. The client would then be provided with resumes from the employment counselor or directly from the candidates. These resumes would be reviewed and interviews would be conducted by the client to determine the proper candidate for the position. This type of hiring process relies heavily on the client assessing the skills of each of the candidates. Advertising the various positions as well as assessing the candidate's ability to perform the job can be quite expensive and time consuming.
Lately, the utilization of computers and the internet has been employed to shorten and streamline the recruitment process. Various job positions are advertised in one of a plurality of job recruitment websites. A particular candidate would electronically transmit their resume directly to the client for evaluation. Based upon this evaluation, the client would then contact an appropriate candidate or candidates to schedule either a personal interview or employ a teleconference to interview the candidates. Based upon the resume and the interview scheduled between the client and the candidate, a determination would be made as to whether a particular candidate would be offered the position.
Additionally, a number of patent references describe a system utilizing a computerized database as well as the internet to facilitate the hiring process. However, these references are generally job based and do not provide any assessment of the candidate's skill level irrespective of a particular employment position. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0050816 to Givens et al. describes a system and method for utilizing a network based computer system for determining whether a particular candidate should be hired for a particular employment. Once a client receives a request from a candidate for the particular job position, a computerized interface component would present to the candidate a predetermined skilled test that is selected based upon the position requested by the candidate. This skill test would then be scored based upon responses made by the candidate, the score then presented to the client. It is important to note that any assessment that the Givens et al. system makes is related to a particular job position and not an overall assessment of the skills of the candidate.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,653,567 to Gorham describes an integrated online job recruitment system including a job database extracting key words from job postings. A query is made by a potential job seeker and a search engine returns its results or gives prominent placement to one or more job postings sponsored by a recruiter. This system requires that the candidate would query the system and not the client. Additionally, no assessment is made regarding the skills of the candidate.